The Foundations of Ethical Marketing for Therapists Part 1: Ethics, Space, and Finding the Right Niche: Part 1 | STP 182
===
β[00:00:00]
Tad Hargrave: the thing that makes marketing ethical is that instead of going for the sale, we go for the truth of is this a fit or not?
And niching is where that really begins. 'cause how do you know if you're a fit? Well, you gotta know who you are and what you're offering and who you want to help. So for most people in the, in the healing professions, I would say that the, most sure way to figure out your niche is this sense that your deepest wound is often a doorway to your truist niche.
So the place, the places you've struggled the most in your life and then you've overcome, you've learned something, you've grown where you've healed, you know, that's where. That's probably the place to focus.
This episode taps into a fundamental fear that helpers and healers have when it comes to marketing. Isn't marketing icky? Isn't marketing manipulative? My guest today, [00:01:00] Tad Hargrave, has changed the way I think about marketing, and he's helped me see and feel that marketing does not have to feel pushy.
It doesn't have to be manipulative. It, it's not icky. It's honest. It can be ethical, It's simply helping the right people find the right help, even if that's not you. This conversation was very useful to me. I was so glad to bring him on.
It actually went a little long, so we're gonna break it into two parts. Here's the first part on ethical marketing for therapists. Let's get into it Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Therapist Podcast. This is the show where I help you take your knowledge and information and turn it into impact. Today I'm super pleased to have a special to introduce you to my special guest. It's Tedd Hargrave Marketing for Hippies. He's been instrumental in the last year, year and a half of how I [00:02:00] understand marketing and getting the, the, the word out about what we're doing in an ethical way. Tad. Thank you so much for joining us and the audience today.
Tad Hargrave: Great to be.
James Marland: I wanted to start out with a, a question that many of the, the people in the audience would have is like, I'm a helper, I'm a healer, and marketing is like the dark side of business. It is the, the thing that makes me feel the worst and the thing I feel icky about. and your thing is all about marketing in an ethical way.
How can somebody who's a helper and healer market without feeling so bad?
Tad Hargrave: Well, when you say marketing, what do you think your people understand that to be?
James Marland: Well, it's probably what that, that's how they are marketed to, you know quick Ads. promise is easy. You know, it's super easy. from somebody you don't really know, from somebody that you, that is just, they show up your, in your inbox, they show up [00:03:00] on your feed they, they say, can solve your problem, buy from me.
Tad Hargrave: Yeah, there you go. So I think part of the challenge is we haven't seen, marketing that's ethical and effective, or we've seen it, but we haven't clocked that. That's marketing. we look at marketing that's very effective, but we just think, oh, that's just them sharing their work. That's just them, you know, being in business. But we don't see the, the brilliance of what they're doing. Sometimes the best, the best marketing doesn't land as marketing. It doesn't land as this.
Everything you just laid out, And so I think this is one of the big problem. We don't have models. I think this is where people get stuck and we're also given these maps and models that just don't relate to the real world. For most people. Marketing like this idea of self-promotion, I'm gonna put myself out there.
I'm gonna
James Marland: Yes.
Tad Hargrave: try to,
James Marland: emotion is huge.
Tad Hargrave: and for almost everybody that feels terrible. It feels terrible to receive somebody telling you how great they are. It [00:04:00] feels terrible to be the one to say, I'm so great and to stand up in front of a room that really is kryptonite for most people, that's not a problem actually.
The fact that this is kryptonite for us, that's
James Marland: Why isn't it a problem?
Tad Hargrave: because well, it's just how it is. It's, I mean, the fact that people feel. Awkward uncomfortable, weak at the knees and self-promotion. It's only a problem if you think you should be better at it. Yeah, and this is the, this is the trouble. People think, oh, I should be better at that.
So then, but we're not good at it just as human beings. We're just generally not good at, at the, the shameless self-promotion. But then we think, oh, but I should be, so now there's the beginning of stress, which is also the opportunity for a coach to come and say, let me help you get over that. And I've got a $10,000 inner work coaching program, and boy, we're gonna really get to it.
And you know, to save you years of therapy and thousands of dollars in this. We might better just accept that this will always [00:05:00] feel awkward, that we're always gonna feel uncomfortable. That if we're at a dinner party and somebody turns to us and says, why don't you tell people what, what you do? All of us would rather the host just say, let me tell you about what my friend does.
We would so much rather somebody else, you know, if they could do a good job of it, would would promote us. So the hu.
James Marland: Yeah, you're right. it's so much easier to say, I love Tad Hargrave and what he does about marketing than to say, oh, James Marlon, you've read, you know, you've read all these books and you've written things, and you've done this podcast. great too.
Tad Hargrave: Yeah.
James Marland: that does not feel good to me.
Tad Hargrave: No, and it, it's not supposed to. That's the thing we're, so the, the human kryptonite is self-promotion. Just there are some people who are really good. And seem to enjoy constantly telling the world how great they are. And those people are called sociopaths, you know? But for the rest of us, this is just a.
A, a strange [00:06:00] dynamic to be in. So that's the, that's the kryptonite. But then if there's kryptonite, that means there's a human superpower. And the superpower that we all have is, we're really great at promoting other people. We're all fantastic lifting other people up and we all know. About ourselves.
Yeah. So then what does marketing become because that it does seem like a checkmate, right? Well, if I'm great at promoting other people and not great at promoting myself, I should probably just hang up a shingle. I dunno. Go work for somebody else and promote them. But it's not that, it's that. Then what does marketing become becomes Making it easy for the people who love us to spread the word about us.
So you cooperate with the, the inevitable dynamic that you're never gonna be. You'll only ever be less shitty at promoting yourself. You're never gonna be great at it, and you're not supposed to be great. You're supposed to bumble a little bit. When somebody says, what do you do? You're supposed to be a little shy and awkward about it.
That's just normal. The, the not normal thing is [00:07:00] somebody who stands up with this polish leg. You know, there's, and there's a tone of voice that comes with it, where it's, my name's Tad Hargrave from Marketing for Hippies, and in my work we covered the seven fundamentals of ethical marketing. How you can Mark, you know, I can't even continue.
James Marland: That did not sound natural for you.
Tad Hargrave: No, it's, and it's not, it's what's natural is somebody says. What do you do? Or hey, you want to introduce yourself, and you stand up and you're like, ah, fuck. That's natural. That's a very normal thing for a human being to do. But again, instead we construct our marketing in such a way that primarily the marketing is coming from other people talking about us, other people endorsing us, other people promoting us, and then we get to be on the receiving end of that instead of the generating end of it.
James Marland: That that is a very way about thinking about marketing. That that's sort of like, does that mean I don't have to buy the course on how to close, you know, the five pressure [00:08:00] closes or the thousand ways to close,
Tad Hargrave: Yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, the, what, and I would say the, all those high pressure closes, all the, how do you sell people, the, the, the ninja tactics, the stealth tactic, all of that, the hype, the pressure, the urgency, the, that. Gets used because we don't have the fundamentals styled. If you have the fundamentals in place, you don't need that stuff.
If you don't have the fundamentals in place, you absolutely need that stuff to get people to move.
James Marland: Wonderful, great setup and, and you used the words that, that really make me recoil, hype, pressure, and urgency. Like, I hate that when people do it to me. I hate it in emails, I hate it in calls. And I, I do not wanna be that per, that is something that I, that's the anti way I wanna get people to, to, to work with me, to use my products. that kind of leads us to the seven fundamentals of [00:09:00] Ethical Marketing. And this is on your webpage, and I'm sure you have a YouTube video on it. Your YouTube channel is it's easy for me to promote you Tad,
Tad Hargrave: Right.
James Marland: you know, 'cause I, I see the value. So but I wanted to ask you about one, one question per fundamental. Be, you know, 'cause each fundamental could probably be its own show. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna quiz you on the fundamentals. Is that okay?
Tad Hargrave: Sounds great.
James Marland: Okay. So the fundamental one is space.
Tad Hargrave: Oh, I, oh, no, actually I've, I've changed it. Fundamental number
James Marland: it.
Tad Hargrave: I did. Yeah.
James Marland: okay, what's fundamental? Number one?
Tad Hargrave: It's ethics. Yeah. Yeah, I
James Marland: number two.
Tad Hargrave: It is. Yeah. I switched it up.
James Marland: it.
Tad Hargrave: Yeah.
James Marland: So
Tad Hargrave: mm-hmm.
James Marland: I can ask my question.
We'll, and you can explain why you swapped it in the in the middle. So ethics is the fundamental, so. To me, as we were talking before, we were having this conversation before I entered, [00:10:00] knew your stuff. Ethics is almost like the anti word for marketing. Like, like, like they, they're oil and water. They don't mix. How can ethics be the fundamental part of
Tad Hargrave: Well, because if you look at the stats, you know, how do most people hear about things? That's word of mouth, right? You, you know, whenever you buy something online, how did you hear about us? 50% or more people just click from a friend. So the, that's, that's the reality of the long term. Dynamic in marketing is it's, it's mostly word of mouth long term.
So there is a question. First of all, how long do you want to be in market in, in the, in the market? And if your answer is just this year, then maybe you don't need to think about ethics, I guess, you know, for yourself. 'cause you can just kind of push and grind and hype and you're not gonna get busted. But.
In the long term, we can all think about the businesses we love, the restaurant, we love the mechanic that we go to and send all our friends to the et cetera, et cetera. Or the coaches online [00:11:00] that we, we hire and work with and tell other people about. And then we can think about the ones we got burned by.
We don't go to anymore. So this is the reality of what happens when you behave unethically. People just, you lose the re repeat business. And most of businesses is the backend. Most of business is the repeat business and reputation. So when you behave unethically, you completely undercut all of that. I mean, I think if people just look at their own life experience, this becomes very obvious that actually ethics is the.
Spaces of effectiveness that if you behave unethically, you make your life much more difficult. I mean, people have to move towns sometimes to start again in a business because they get such a, a reputation. Or you have to spend so much money on ads to constantly get new people in. Why? 'cause nobody's sticking around because you're so shady.
So, so it's, if you wanna make your life harder, behave unethically. But if you want the marketing to get easier every year to have more and more word of mouth every year, then [00:12:00] yeah, you treat people well and people, and even if they don't work with you, you know, sometimes you turn somebody away, you say, look, you're, you need help with this, but I really do more X, Y, Z.
You need A, B, C. The person I'd recommend to go to is this. And what they'll remember is they could have taken my money. I had the money right there. The cash was on the table and they turned it away. And now they're gonna tell their friends who are struggling with the X, Y, Z thing that they help with, they're gonna say, you should go see this person.
'cause they're, they're trustworthy.
James Marland: I, I think car Mechanic is a great. A great example of that because when, when you're on, when you're on social media or Facebook or in those hometown things, what is the one question that comes up regularly? My car's broken. Who's honest? Who can I trust? And I, I have a store. I went to a chain shop and they told me I needed like a $2,500 repair. And I was like, oh, I, you know, I didn't have the money and I bought the part. It was like $600. I went to the local mechanic, Hey, can you put this in? And they're like. [00:13:00] we just greased your brakes or whatever they did. Like we, we loosened it up, we cleaned it and it works fine. Yeah. Sorry, you spent $600 on that part.
But this fix was like a hundred bucks. I, I went to that guy until he went outta business and I told everybody about how cool he was and how he saved me $2,000 at one time. Could have he taken my money, could have he put in that part, would've I known the difference. Not at all, but I, I sing the praises of the guy who treated me ethically and I tell the story about how this person tried to burn me almost every chance.
I get
Tad Hargrave: Yeah, there, there's, there's a thing in word of mouth where it's, if you, if you do a good job, you get, I dunno, three outta 10 word of mouth or two outta 10 word of mouth, right? If you screw people, you get like a. 10 outta 10 word of mouth. But if you screw people or [00:14:00] accidentally, you know, you make a mistake, you blunder and then you make it good, you get like 13 outta 10.
It's just like, that's the most. So when you make things right you also get word of mouth. But that's the ethics. 'cause we're all gonna make mistakes, we're all gonna blunder. But if you can fix it, then people rave about it or Yeah. You fix somebody else's unethical thing and then people rave about it.
Yeah. So that's why that's, that's what, yeah, yeah,
James Marland: Good, good foundation for marketing. So is the next one space then?
Tad Hargrave: yeah. I realize I had to add space because it's really, the ethics is the, it's kind of the, the big foundation. But then with space, we start to move into this conversation directly of effectiveness of how are you gonna actually get clients? And the thing I've found over the years. Is people will come to me desperate for money and clients and think they're broke and it's really tight, and I give them ideas.
Ideas that I know work. It's not the problem of the idea. And then they [00:15:00] would come back not having implemented it and they just didn't have time. So it's, you know, the se if you wanna make more money in your practice. The bottom line is it has to be a bigger priority, which means you've gotta have the space in your life.
But most of us are drowning. We're overgiving to too many people. We don't get to the bottom of our inbox. And if you are that maxed out. Nothing I could say will help. I mean, you can be a good person, a honest person, but if you're too busy, I mean, A, that, that also starts to cannibalize the ethics because you're so maxed out.
But b, you actually just don't have time to do anything. We're about to go into the rest of the fundamentals. So for me, it's like you gotta, Marie Kondo your life. I mean, you start with your physical environment, you declutter, you, get out of commitments that you're half-hearted about. You probably get out of a bunch of commitments you're really full-hearted about, but you just, you can't, there's gotta be some really sharp elbows thrown to, to [00:16:00] make this space in our, in our, our life.
You know, for a lot of people getting off social media can be enormously helpful. But if you're, if you just don't have time, there's, there's no, there's no point of the rest of it.
James Marland: Yeah, you, you said something two things, really. I, I, I recently read a book about management 'cause I struggle with it. And one was the declutter. If your brain is constantly like looking at the clutter and then saying, well, I'll do that later. I'll do that later, or I'll fix that later. mental energy. You do that, you know where you're working is, is important. And I'm like, oh, that's all right. That that was a big challenge. And the other thing was the yes and no. Like what you say yes to means you what you say yes to means you have to say no to something else.
Tad Hargrave: Yeah.
James Marland: if you're so busy, you gotta say, you're gonna say no to the things you need to do.
Tad Hargrave: Yeah.
James Marland: you gonna say about that?
Tad Hargrave: Well, like if you imagine I've got a piece of paper and on one side's. Yes. A one side's. [00:17:00] No. And I lift it up and I show you the side that says yes, I'm saying yes to you, but what that means of what I'm looking at is no to me and vice versa. Yeah. If you pick up one end of the stick, you're gonna pick up the other end You.
So one of the, sometimes we're so overgiving and we have a problem with making promises and we just say yes too quick and it's better to just start with no. And one of the best piece of advice I ever got on, on time management, this is just whenever somebody says, Hey, you know, can you do this? Would you be interested?
You say, you never ever say yes in the moment. Because you're gonna wanna make them happy. So instead you say, man, I would love to do that. Let me get back to you. I gotta, let me sleep on that. I gotta check the, my calendar, but I'll get back to you. Get, get out of the conversation and then think about it with some sobriety.
And then the answer's probably no. And you know, it's, it's the old Kenny Rogers line. You know, you gotta know when to hold them. You gotta know when to fold them. And most of the time you fold, if you're playing poker [00:18:00] right, you, you fold. 80% of the time, you don't, you don't go all in. And most of us we're just, we just keep betting.
We just keep throwing in. Yeah, I'll do that, I'll do that. And then we burn out and we need to simplify usually dramatically. It's what I see for most entrepreneurs.
James Marland: Great. next, the next one is niche. Niche, however you wanna say it. I guess I remember this is what you taught on at the, the conference I went to. It was your target. I forget what that's called. but if I was going to, I was going to clarify my niche, what is the top, the top of that?
Like, what do I have to nail to get right?
Tad Hargrave: Well, the first thing that's gotta start with is the realization that you can't be everything to everybody. Which is, that's a hard realization. There's often a lot of kinda grief. 'cause there's this, we, we [00:19:00] we're often so people pleasing and especially helpers. I don't wanna turn anyone away. It would be mean unkind to turn somebody away.
But you know, we've all had it where we're dating somebody and we realize, it's not a fit. We're not, our heart isn't a, and now you could stick around 'cause it's convenient and well, the rent's cheaper with you living together. And it's not bad. It's comfortable, but you know, for yourself you could do better and you know that they could do better than somebody who's not really in.
And in that way, breaking up becomes. Merciful, you know, it becomes an act of love even though it's painful on both sides. And it's the same with, you know, and so somebody wants to date you. I mean, just 'cause they want to date you, don't mean you have to say yes. But of course this is some people's dating strategy.
They asked me and I just said I had to. So with clients, it's the same. Okay, somebody wants to work with you, that's great. That's half the picture. But do you wanna work with them? And there's two questions I'd be asking. One is, do these people light you up? [00:20:00] Number two, can you really, really help them make progress on this issue?
Is this something you feel strong about? If those two things are true, great, but if they're not, I wouldn't, you know, this is where you might refer them to somebody else. So when we're looking at our niche, again, we start with this, I can't be everything to everybody. Okay? So it means I'm gonna be somebody to somebody, you know, I'll be something to a particular person and, hmm.
James Marland: you even spell that out on your webpage. I think it's on your homepage. You know, what is it? What do you need to know to work with me? I forget the title, but you put it like right there, clearly on your homepage
Tad Hargrave: Yeah, I recommend for every therapist, you know, to have a, a part on their, their homepage or a, an ideal client, or are we a fit page that's just, we could be a fit if
James Marland: Yeah.
Tad Hargrave: could be a fit if this, and we probably not a fit if this, and that's the orienting thing. You know, the thing that makes marketing ethical is that instead of going for the sale, we go for the truth of is this a fit or not?[00:21:00]
And niching is where that really begins. 'cause how do you know if you're a fit? Well, you gotta know who you are and what you're offering and who you want to help. So for most people in the, in the healing professions, I would say that the, the most sure way to figure out your niche is this sense that your deepest wound is often a doorway to your truist niche.
So the place, the places you've struggled the most in your life and then you've overcome, you've learned something, you've grown where you've healed, you know, that's where. That's probably the place to focus. So if you had social anxiety and you got over that, if you had, were depressed and you got over that, if you, whatever it is, you went through a brutal divorce and you got to the other side and you learned a lot from it, that may be an area to really focus your niche.
I mean, my business marketing for hippies came because I did all this sketchy marketing stuff and sales stuff early in the day, and then, you know, I, I learned and I built a whole business around it.
James Marland: Well I'm gonna [00:22:00] sum that up with the two things that I took from that is instead of like, I love this phrase, instead of going for the sale, go for the truth. who can you really help? What do they need? Do they need that from you? And then the other thing was, where have you healed? That's gonna be, that's a, that's a, a sign that, that your strongest niche, the people that you're gonna connect with the most are gonna be in that area. Great. We could probably go, you have webinars on this, you have webinars just on niching. It's, it's wonderful. I'd go use that. Okay. Next one is point of view. So what is point of view and how does it help me in my marketing?
Tad Hargrave: Point of view is one of the major things that helps. Them filter to see if we're a fit for them.
Ooh, such good stuff. That's where we're gonna stop for today.
In part two, Tad and I pick right back up with point of view, what does that actually mean, and how it can help the right people decide if [00:23:00] you're a good fit without having to pressure, without having to convince them. And from there, we're gonna go into business models, hubs, and how to actually share your work.
I'm so excited. We'll see you in part two
As we close out the show, I wanna thank our pro-level sponsors of scalingtherapistservices.com. We have Ray at Humor Speaks, RevKey, Practice Collab, Arc Integrated, TheraSaaS CRM, Guest Compliance and Consulting LLC, Private Practice Elevation, Freedom Business Solutions, Bosco LLC, Profit Comes First, River Street Studios, Wealth and Worth Within, Therapy Flow, Course Creation Studios, and of course, we thank our listeners.
Hey, if you're looking to solve your therapy practice business bottlenecks, head over to scalingtherapistservices.com for trusted [00:24:00] business solutions. We'll see you next time.
